January 2013

There's something about the Hawaiian Islands that inspires people to take pen in hand and capture their thoughts (A real pen fer cryin' out loud, not some beastly gadget!). Those fortunate enough to remember and treasure books are blessed by little discoveries such as the tome pictured above.

"Traveling Hawaiian Byways with Pen and Camera" are extracts from a 1936 logbook by a great American, agricultural marketer and learned man of letters named Ross H. Gast. At the behest of the University of Hawaii, Mr. Gast was among those experts whose goal, according to press accounts he cites, of helping the islanders fashion a self-sustainable food supply.

We picked up this copy of Mr. Gast's reminisces during a tour of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

Six months into Gast's assignment, he became manager of the Inter Island Steamship Company Grower Service Department and then eventually returned to California.

In between, we are left with his musings inspired by his boyhood idol Mark Twain, who, he noted first popularized the Hawaiian Islands as a tourist destination while in the employ of the Sacramento Union newspaper in 1866.

Among the book's little gems are the observance that Twain once embarked on a plan to write a novel with Hawaii as its setting, but alas, it was never finished.

Twain's lone opportunity to return to the islands was thwarted in 1895. He had promised to lecture there during the course of a late life assignment to tour Australia, but like other shipmates, was barred from setting foot on the island because of a cholera epidemic.

Twain's wrote in "Following the Equator"that instead he could only gaze at Oahu from offshore: "If I could." Twain wrote, "I would have gone ashore and never left."